Myth: Good design isn’t needed if you’re already at the top of search engine results.

Well, I would say that, actually, both are needed!

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk about this idea that you don’t need good web design if you’re already showing up at the top of search engine results. The reality is that these are two separate things, and actually both are needed.

Using your website to get you business, to get you new customers, is actually a two-step process.

The first step is, you have to get found. When people go online to search for a service provider, you want them to find you. You want them to find your website. But once they click on that link and come to your website, then your website needs to connect with them emotionally and convince them to either pick up the phone and call you, or come into your store location, or fill out the contact form, or however it is that they get in touch with you to start doing business with you.

And that is a function of design.

Good web design makes an emotional connection with people. It causes them to trust you and to trust your brand. It makes them want to do business with you. So actually, you need both. You need to be at the top of the search engine results so that people can find you, and you need good web design to make that emotional connection with people so that once they come to your site, they’re wanting to do business with you.

Absolutely not true. When you launch a website, there are a lot of things that need to happen in order to get your website found by the people that need to connect with you.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you today about a common myth related to websites, and that is this idea that if you build it and launch it, they’re going to come to you. Well, many, many business owners have discovered that this just isn’t the case.

Now, we all know that this is not true in the offline world, but somehow we imagine that it’s going to be true in the online world, that all I need to do is get my website built and launched and then automatically I’m going to have people finding it and get customers from that website.

Your website is just a collection of files that sits on a computer somewhere in the world. Once that website is launched, nobody knows that it exists, and it really takes a lot of work to get people to find your website. Expecting that you’re going to launch a website and automatically have people finding it is sort of like opening a new business, printing up a whole bunch of business cards, and sitting at your new desk with your business cards waiting for people to show up. It’s just not going to happen. At a minimum, you need a sign out on the street that says what kind of business you’re in so that people can walk in.

But more than that, when you launch a new business, most people understand that you need some advertising. You need to send out some flyers and maybe need to make some phone calls. You want to do something to get people to learn about your new business and come and seek you out.

Well, this is also true with your website. Your website is a great way to get people to find you, but once the site is launched, it does take a fair amount of effort to get it found by the people who are likely to become your best customers. In fact, the effort involved in getting your website found by the right people is usually a lot greater than the effort in getting your website built and launched in the first place.

When we’re sitting down with new clients working on their web design, one of the things that we do differently from many other designers is figure out the long-term strategy for how their website is going to grow their business so that this strategy can actually be incorporated into the design process. But even when your site is already built and launched, you can always go back and develop a plan for getting your site found and for making the site effective as your number 1 employee.

Not true! There’s actually a huge difference between pay-per-click and SEO, or search engine optimization.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk about pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing, as well as search engine optimization (or SEO), and how these can be done more effectively and how they can help you grow your business.

One of the things that I hear sometimes is that SEO or search engine optimization is pay-as-you-go, which means that it’s simply a matter of more dollars in resulting in more visitors to my website. The more dollars I put in, the more visitors I instantly get to my website.

Well, that’s just simply not true. And a lot of times people confuse what is called pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization or SEO. Both are ways to get people to your website who are online searching for a service provider. But the two models work very, very differently.

Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it means I am paying the search engine to have somebody click on the link that leads to my website. In that kind of model, it is true in a sense that the more dollars I pay for clicks, the more people I’m going to get to my website. With a pay-per-click model like Google AdWords?that’s a very common example of a pay-per-click type of advertising?the more money I pay, the more people I’m going to get as a kind of a general rule. And as soon as I stop paying, I’m going to stop getting people to my website.

Search engine optimization works very, very differently. Search engine optimization means doing a whole lot of technical things (which I’m not going to get into) to make the search engines think that your website is the best result for people who are online searching for a service provider. Therefore, when somebody goes in and searches for the kind of business that you provide, the search engine is going to display you as the best link. You’re not paying to be put in that position?at least not directly. You’re not paying the search engine to be put in that position, but rather you’ve done a whole lot of work to make the search engine consider you as the best result for certain people.

Now with SEO, you’re not going to see an immediate result. It usually takes time to do the work to get your website to the place where it is seen as one of the best options by the search engine. But once you get there, it’s very easy to maintain that position if you keep doing the work. You can stay ahead of the competition at a much lower overall cost than with the pay-per-click campaign.

Now the funny thing is, even with a pay-per-click campaign?although it is a model where if I pay more, I get more traffic?most of the pay-per-click advertisers give quality scores to the campaigns and the ads and the web pages, which means that there can be as much as an 800% difference on Google AdWords with the amount of traffic you’re getting for your campaign with the exact same budget, depending on how well it’s done.

So, one person may be running a Google AdWords campaign spending $3,000 a month and getting half of the visitors that somebody else is getting on a budget of $1,000 a month, because the one who’s investing $1,000 a month is doing it right, and doing it really, really well, with high quality scores, whereas the person who’s spending $3,000 a month is just throwing money at the wall and it’s not getting nearly as much result.

Every day, there are hundreds of people online searching for you and the service you provide, and I want them to find you. So this is not a simple pay-as-you-go model, but rather it’s a matter of figuring out what is the best strategy, short-term and long-term, for your business?whether to use a pay-per-click search-engine-marketing campaign, or to use search engine optimization campaign, or both?and to do them in such a way that you get the maximum result for your investment, to make your website effective as your number 1 employee.

Simply not true. There’s a huge range of types and qualities of web hosting providers and in the impact that that web hosting has on your business.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk to you today about web hosting. There is a myth out there that is very common, that all web hosting is the same.

The fact is that there are all kinds of web hosting providers, and a wide range in the quality of their equipment, how that equipment is used, the types of data centers the hosting is in, and–what’s most important and the bottom line–in the impact that web hosting can have on growing your business.

Now, web hosting is one of those terms that kind of makes people’s eyes glaze over, so I hope I don’t get too geeky and technical on you here. But it’s really important to understand what web hosting is. Your website is actually a collection of files sitting on a computer somewhere. Typically, it’s a collection of text documents with some HTML and CSS code, as well as some documents containing software code, along with some pictures and maybe some videos. And if there’s software, the computer it’s on needs to have the ability to run that software. But either way, your website lives on a computer somewhere. It’s a collection of files on a computer.

That computer may be a good computer, or it may be a really old, really slow computer. It may be on a computer with ten websites on it, or it may be on a computer with ten thousand websites. Now, you know on your own personal computer, if you get too many windows or documents open, your computer can really slow down.

Well, if you think about it, if you have a computer that has ten thousand websites running?which, by the way, is a very common scenario with cheap web hosts?that computer is going to be very slow. Not only that, it could be an older computer with not so much horsepower and not so much memory. And not only that, that computer could be stuck off in a corner, far away from the Internet backbone, which means that the person who wants to access your website has to go through a whole bunch of connections to get there.

The end result is that you can have a website that’s on a slow computer that’s running even slower because of the ten thousand other websites running on the same machine that’s far away from the Internet backbone. And that experience for your customer visiting your website can be less than ideal.

Your pages may load slowly. Occasionally those computers with ten thousand websites on them can be targets for hackers, and you can get some malware or some sources of spam (or worse) on the computer that’s hosting your website.

This is not only a bad experience for your users; the search engines don’t like those kinds of situations either. So your site is probably not going to rank nearly as well on one of those cheap web hosts. And I’ve seen many occasions where this got someone’s website banned from Google.

It’s also possible to host your website on a really fast, new computer, in a good data center that’s close to the Internet backbone, on a machine that has only a few websites on it (with a lot of resources dedicated to your site). In that situation, your site is going to perform a lot better. The search engines are going to like it a lot better. More people are going to be finding you in online search. More people are going to be liking your website when they do find you. And even though it’s very hard to measure and nobody’s going to tell you they hired you because you have a good web host, this usually results in your getting more business.

The difference in investment between a quality web host and a cheap web host can be significant, but when you compare it to the opportunity cost of how much business you could lose on a cheap web host versus how much more business you could gain on a high quality web host, to me it’s an investment that is well, well worth it. In fact, there is no way I would ever want to put any of my websites on anything but a high quality web host.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.– Bruce Lee

The first time I read something I can get some good information. The second time I read it, it starts to sink in and transformation takes place. The third time I read it, it starts to crystallize inside me.

Once for information.

Twice for transformation.

Three times for crystallization.

There’s a fallacy that growth, forward progress and success is about getting more information. If I just read enough books, go to enough seminars, listen to enough audios, watch the right videos, then I’ll get the information that I need to be successful.

That’s why the self-help industry, and the info-marketers in particular, are making billions of dollars. People go from one how-to system to another, from one seminar to another, from one home study course to another, looking for the magic information bullet.

It doesn’t work that way. It’s not about information. If information worked to change our lives, we’d all be beautiful, healthy, thin, rich and popular. Transformation starts to take place the second time you go through the material. And the real shifts happen on the third and fourth time through, as you are practicing what you learn.

As Bruce Lee said, the formidable opponent is not the one who has learned 10,000 kicks. It’s the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

You don’t need to read 10 sales books to be successful in sales. You don’t even need to read everything in one book. You can take one chapter and practice it over and over until you become formidable.

Sometimes in my emails, I’m sending out what is (hopefully) good information. But often I’m focused on creating distinctions. Distinctions are the insights that come, the things that you see that you can’t unsee. Like how gravity works. If you let go of a book, it’s going to fall. You don’t know it because you learned that as a fact in school; you know it because you’ve seen how gravity works and you’ve internalized it as part of your reality. Believe it or not, before Galileo, people didn’t understand quite how gravity worked. But after Galileo showed them, they saw it and it couldn’t be unseen.

So if you read something to help you with your business, read it from a different place. Create a space in your reading where insights can come and “ahas” can happen. Slow down. If something moves you, read it again. Then again. And practice and apply what you read. Because otherwise it’s just information.

We hear a lot about resilience. People talk about being okay in spite of circumstances. And we’ve all experienced the opposite, being hurt by something that happened to us, either physically or psychologically.

But there’s a third state of being that we all have access to that may benefit us even more.

The scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this third state of being in his book Antifragile. He observed that there are things which are easily broken (fragile), and things which are not easily broken (resiliant). He coined the word antifragile to describe things which are made stronger by volatility, stress and adversity.

There are materials that illustrate this. Glass is robust up to a certain point, but then it shatters with the right amount of stress in a sudden shock. Brass is fairly resilient. You can drop it, step on it or throw it and it will not shatter. But a bicycle frame made out of carbon nanotubes actually gets stronger when you pound on it. Instead of labeling, “Fragile. Handle with care,” you could label the antifragile package, “Benefits from shock.”

A fire is also a good illustration. A candle is fragile, and is easily blown out by a slight breath. A blow torch is resilient. It is not easily blown out, even in very windy conditions. But a forest fire is antifragile. The more you blow on it, the hotter it burns. If you throw logs in front of a forest fire to try to stop it, you only feed the fire.

Our bodies are mostly antifragile. Without stress, our muscles and bones become weak. Stress, resistance and a constantly changing outward environment is what makes us stronger (within reason of course).

What we don’t realize is that fragility, resilience and antifragility are also emotional states that we can choose in response to any situation. Say something bad about me, and I could crumble (fragile), or I may not care (resilient). Or I may decide to work harder to prove you wrong (antifragile).

The more I am conscious of this choice that I have, the better my life will be. In my life, at any given moment there are things that I am upset about (fragile), things that I am indifferent to (resilient), and things that have me upping my game (antifragile).

We love movies about antifragile people. Rocky. Rudy. Remember the Titans. How much more powerful we will be in our business and in our daily lives when we choose to live the same way. Antifragile is a place to come from, in the way we work, in the way we interact with people. Put a label on yourself, “Benefits from shock,” or, “Benefits from adversity.” Be the kite that rises against the wind.

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